CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“I’ve missed you.” There, Marta thought, she’d said it. She hadn’t felt this uncertain for decades. She looked up to find Harry regarding her with bright, unreadable eyes. He reached across the small table and touched her hand in a fleeting, comforting caress.

“You are too kind, Marta.”

He didn’t pretend not to understand the invitation her admission offered. It was only one of the qualities she found so appealing in him.

“Am I?” she asked lightly, unwilling to push him, afraid that if she forced him to make some sort of decision, he’d make the wrong one. “I’ve never been accused of that before.”

“Kind and lovely,” he said. “Would you care for a glass of sherry?”

“That would be nice,” she answered. He rose and went to the sideboard where he unhurriedly poured out a glass.

She wondered if he was taking the opportunity to fashion a reply, and her pulse accelerated with a foreign sensation of self-doubt. She shouldn’t have come. She shouldn’t have arrived on his doorstep, unannounced and uninvited. Not so soon after he’d spent an evening watching Desdemona Carlisle with such painful intensity.

She had missed Harry. He was a zealous, ardent lover, concentrating more on the pleasure he gave than that which he received. But even more than the physical relationship—delectable though that had been—she’d missed the intimacy after they’d made love.

She had the distinct impression that Harry had spent years on the outside looking in, had wanted things denied him. And that those years of exclusion had been improbably translated not into bitterness but into a fervent appreciation of those who allowed him entree. He’d always seemed surprised by her interest in him and had expressed his gratitude in the most physical way possible. It had been heady.

“Your drink.”

He was standing over her, holding out the sherry. She could see where he’d nicked himself shaving. She took the glass and set it on the table beside her, impulsively reaching out and capturing his hand, tugging it.

“Please, Harry. Sit beside me.”

He obliged, pressing her hand between both of his big, warm palms.

“We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?” she asked. When he didn’t reply, she went on. “How long have we been in Egypt, Harry? I’ve been here a decade. You arrived shortly after Ned died. What does that make it? Eight years?”

“Hardly seems possible.”

“Think of all the experiences we’ve racked up between the two of us. All the winks we’ve given to custom and convention. We’re a reprobate lot, we are.” She tried a laugh.

He smiled. “Indeed.”

It wasn’t working. She could see it in the steadiness of his gaze, the unwavering concern in his expression. Whatever he thought, he did not pair them in his mind. He had never even considered it.

There was still another course open for convincing him.

She leaned against him, just enough so that her breast pressed his upper arm. She felt his biceps tense. If she could engage his body, afterward she might engage his heart.

“Harry,” she whispered, pulling her hand free and laying it against his chest. His heart beat steadily beneath her palm. “Harry. We were good together.”

“Yes.” He sounded sad. “We were.”

She did not like the slight emphasis he placed on the past tense. She dipped her head, touching his throat with her lips.

“We could be again.” She watched him carefully, waiting for a sign of awakening sexual awareness in the dilation of his pupils.

“I haven’t any doubt,” he said. “If only—”

“Master Harry!”

Harry’s head snapped up at the sound of the breathless voice. Marta frowned but made no move to disengage herself from his side. A thin Arab boy stood panting in the doorway.

“What is it, Duraid?” Harry asked, concerned when he should have been irritated.

“It is Sitt.”

“What?” He surged to his feet, Marta forgotten.

“Sitt is in the bazaar.”

“Yes?”

“I think she … She may need you. She is—”

“Tell me as you take me to her,” Harry broke in.

And then he was out the door, following the boy, not a word to her as he left, his entire concentration focused on Desdemona Carlisle. His entire bloody world.

Marta picked up the abandoned glass of sherry, lifting it and studying the way the amber fluid prismed in the late-afternoon light. Harry Braxton to the rescue. Why the hell couldn’t the brat have gone for Lord Ravenscroft?

Abruptly she hurled the glass against the wall.

The foolish woman had wandered off, alone and untended. Joseph wrung his hands, apologizing profusely when Harry questioned him further.

“But she said she had smoked the hookah before, Harry!” He practically wept.

“Filled with tobacco, you ass. Tobacco!”

“It was tobacco! The bowl had been used for hashish a few days ago. I did not realize that she would be so susceptible to the residue. How was I to know, Harry? At first, she seemed quite at home with the effects. No fear. None.”

“She doesn’t know to be afraid. At least not about things like this. And most especially not—” He cut the words off. Even though he realized that Joseph was not to blame, it did not keep him from wanting to throttle the miserable-looking dealer. “Which way did she go?”

“I do not know.” Joseph flung up his hands in despair. “I thought her bodyguard was with her. I did not attend.”

Bodyguard. Harry swung around. Duraid flinched.

“You know how she is, Master Harry,” the boy said. “I knew I would be unable to make her do anything she did not want to do. And I thought that if she took it into her mind to do something dangerous … well, you know how she is!”

“Yes, I know how she is.” He shook off images of all the potential danger she might stumble into in her present condition. Usually Desdemona’s common sense overruled her impulsiveness. But under the influence of hashish, her inhibitions may well have been stripped from her. The thought made his blood run cold.

“Duraid, you go toward the river. I’ll go east in case she’s taken it into her head to wander alone into that section of the city. She couldn’t be so reckless,” he said to himself.

“She may,” Joseph said miserably. “She was feeling very triumphant. Very secure. And if she was worried about the boy—”

“Dammit to hell!”

Harry strode out of the shop and into the warrens creeping through the crowded buildings. If he was Dizzy—He swore. Trying to think that way was an exercise in futility. It was his luck, his curse, to love such an independent, unpredictable, and valiant little romantic. But love her he did. With all of what he called his heart and every piece of his soul, he loved Desdemona Carlisle. And she was missing, damn her.

He stalked through the emptying streets, asking questions, finding no answers. No one was willing to admit they’d seen an unattended young Englishwoman, and with each passing minute his fear grew. Though Cairo was safer than many large cities and Dizzy’s nationality guarded her from most dangers, there were always a few men desperate enough, debased enough, or stupid enough not to resist the lure of easy prey.

He quickened his pace, trying to drown his building panic. Perhaps Duraid had found her. Perhaps even now she was lying in her bed at home, fighting the sapping lethargy that came with hashish. Perhaps she had a headache. He hoped to God it was a horrible headache.

At the entrance to a cramped alley he spotted a boy playing some solitary game in the dust. He stopped. The child looked to have been there for hours.

“A lady,” he said in terse Arabic, “an Anglizi lady, very small, pretty, yellow hair. Have you seen her?”

Without pausing, the boy nodded.

“Where?” His heart pounded. He held out a piastre.

“Yes, yes!” The boy nodded vigorously, his eyes fixed on the coin. “A golden-haired woman. Crying.”

“Jesus—where?”

The boy jerked his thumb toward the alley entrance. “A quarter hour ago.”

Harry flipped him the coin and turned.

“She was followed, Sid.”

Followed? Harry broke into a trot, following the upward incline of the dirt path. A sense of hushed anticipation pervaded the abandoned lane. His boot heels hit dully against the ancient packed earth. A door closed behind him. A whispered voice, another corner …

Six men stood in the deepening shadows, like a pack of jackals on the periphery of a campfire. They waited with animal patience as they eyed the small figure crumpled against the wall where the lane abruptly ended.

Dizzy.

He strode through their numbers, heedless of their snarling recoil, and bent, snatching Dizzy up in his arms, fear and rage thrumming in his temples.

“Dizzy, are you all right?” he demanded urgently. He waited until he felt her nod before turning.

The men had closed in behind him. He did not look at them. He did not dare look at them. Muscles cramped, bunching in his jaw. He lifted Dizzy higher. Her arms twined around his neck in a childlike bid for comfort, and she burrowed her face against his throat. He could feel the salty moisture of her tears on his bare skin.

He walked into their midst. He felt his upper lip curl as he stared straight ahead, afraid that if he saw one threatening movement directed at Dizzy he would explode with violence, further endangering her. He could feel them closing in around him, the press of their malevolence, the violence implicit in their silence, and he struggled to restrain his impulse to turn and confront them.

How dare they? The thought threatened his reason, swamping cool intellect with hot rage. How dare they think of hurting her?

And then, as quickly as danger had presented itself, it was gone. Some unseen signal passed among the men and they shrank from his advance: silent, surly, and watchful.

He carried her through the alley, past the boy and down the road, down a dozen roads and a dozen more lanes and knew that he could have carried her thus forever. Only when they were in sight of her house did he look for a deserted side street. As much as she would have laughed at the suggestion, he did not want her encountering her grandfather in her present condition.

He stopped, hoping to give her time to compose herself, but he could not yet bring himself to set her down. Not yet. He needed to feel her: the graceful strength of her; her lush, light weight; the texture of her wilted dress; the warmth of her skin beneath it. He needed to inhale the scent of her damp brow, her hair, the faint tobacco flavor of her breath. Everything about her was precious and essential to him and he had so few chances to hold her though, like a thief, he always looked for an excuse, stole any opportunity, to touch her. He couldn’t relinquish her, not yet.

“Dizzy. Are you all right?” His voice sounded hoarse and foreign to his ear.

She lifted her head, her dark eyes luminous in the odd twilight. “What took you so long?” she wailed. “I was afraid!”

He started to grin.

“Don’t smile. I was afraid. I was lost.”

“You shouldn’t have left the shop.”

“I know,” she admitted. She’d always been honest, even with herself. It was as unique as it was tantalizing. “But Duraid was gone and I was worried about him and I thought … I thought—Oh, Harry!”

“Shh,” he murmured, rubbing his lips against the silky cleanliness of her hair until a faint odor of hashish rose from the spilled strands. He scowled, abruptly recalled to her condition. “What the hell do you think you were doing, smoking hashish?”

“Hashish?” she asked, her fine, dark eyes clouding. She was, he realized for the first time, still under the influence of the drug. “I didn’t smoke any hashish.”

“What do you think you and Joseph were smoking?”

“Tobacco? He said it was tobacco.”

“Bullshit.”

“Okay. I admit that after a while I thought it was interesting tobacco, but I’ve never—okay, once. Okay, half a dozen times—smoked tobacco, so how was I to know?”

“Common sense?” he asked sardonically.

She wiggled in his clasp, as if to remove herself from his embrace. Fat chance. He wasn’t ready to let her go yet. But then, he never would be.

“You don’t have to be so unchivalrous about it,” she said in a grumpy, offended voice, settling back in his arms after what appeared to be no more than an obligatory attempt to dislodge herself.

“I am unchivalrous.” His voice was flat. There it was again, the wall separating them, Dizzy’s insistence on fairy-tale princes. No, not some fairy-tale prince. An English fairy-tale prince and an English happily-ever-after, a role he could never fill in a setting he would never return to. “And unscrupulous and ungentlemanly and untrustworthy.”

“You don’t have to remind me.” She twisted in his arm and gazed accusingly up at him, obviously having been reminded of some grievance she had. “You owe me money.”

“I do?”

“Yes. You should pay me.”

He bounced her in his arms and leered down at her, once more falling into the familiar pattern they’d found for their relationship. “Usually when a woman demands payment it is for either a service or pleasure. Sometimes both. Now, I don’t specifically recall receiving either from you, but if you’d care to remedy—”

“Ha!” she crowed, ignoring his suggestive tone. She must be farther gone than he’d thought. “You have so received service from me.”

“Have I? Odd that I would have forgotten.”

It didn’t seem to occur to her that she was conversing with a man who held her as tightly as if his life depended on it, and for this he was grateful. He needed only to keep her distracted in order to steal a few minutes of physical pleasure. Something he was not, nor ever hoped to be, above.

“Yes,” she said. “You owe me money for all the translations, transcriptions, and authentications I’ve done for you over the years.”

“I’ve already paid you.”

“Yes, but you paid me too little.”

“How do you conclude?” he asked, amused. “I paid you what you asked.”

“You took advantage of me. I didn’t know to ask for more.”

He was quickly losing interest in the conversation, being distracted by the way she kept fiddling with his shirt collar. Her fingers, brushing idly against his skin, teased him as tantalizingly as butterfly wings.

“You’ll have to enlighten me. I’m feeling particularly dense.” And he was suddenly tired of playing the affable, immoral scoundrel she thought him. He wanted so much more.

Her mouth flattened with disbelief. She was as slender and supple as a temple cat and he wanted to stroke her. He couldn’t. He could only hold his breath each time her breast pushed against his chest, each time her words washed her breath over his lips.

She squirmed until she’d managed to push her hand into her skirt pocket—a hand that came dangerously near a certain part of his anatomy that was fast becoming oversensitized. He breathed an inaudible sigh of relief when she found whatever it was she’d been looking for and withdrew her hand.

Jesus. She had no idea what she did to him. She never had.

“There!” she crowed in woozy triumph, shoving a crumpled piece of paper against his chest.

“There, what?”

She smoothed the paper out and held it under his nose. “Read that, you blackguard.”

Mutely he stared at the paper. He would have gladly offered a limb to be able to follow her directive. But he couldn’t.

He couldn’t read.